Before and After: This Under-$200 Bathroom Refresh Brings the Spa Vibes
Playing it safe with paint colors is a great way to sell a house, since neutral hues can kind of blend into the background. But those go-to paint colors aren’t exactly inspiring. Take this bathroom from Caroline Lemp. When she and her husband moved in their new home this year, they knew there were some projects in store for them—one of which was the master bathroom. “It was the same shade of yellow-beige as every other room in the house,” Caroline says. “It also had beige shower and bath tile, beige floor tile, and a beige vanity and mirror, so it all just blended together. It made us feel like everything was the same color and so boring.”
While the bathroom was spacious, a lot felt wasted, Caroline says. “We had just moved in, and it felt like the space was for staging but not for actual living,” she says. She wanted to make it more practical and take advantage of the room’s high ceilings to store some of the things they couldn’t fit in the vanity.
“While we couldn’t afford to reconfigure the bathroom like we would want to in the future, I knew there was potential, and so much we could do on a budget,” Caroline says. She and her husband decided to do a mini makeover to help make their bathroom more enjoyable in the meantime.
To give their bathroom more personality, they started with a leafy green paint on the walls (Sherwin-Williams’ Sage Green). “Our bedroom and bathroom are both south-facing, so we have lots of natural light and big windows,” Caroline says. “I knew we could take advantage of this and paint the bathroom a dark bold color and put lots of plants that need strong sun to brighten it up.”
The new green color also helped make the floor tiles look less washed out, which in turn made them look newer. Fresh white paint on the trim helped, too.
Above the toilet, Caroline added a black towel rack from Amazon to hold both extra towels and extra toilet paper. For the towels in use, she mounted cast iron hooks she got on Etsy.
Slim shelves from IKEA over the tub hold a collection of candles—extremely spa-like. Above the shelves, Caroline and her husband were able to repurpose a couple New Orleans-inspired pieces that had been sitting in their basement.
“The biggest challenge was balancing this bold green with neutrals as to not overwhelm the space,” says Caroline. She also wanted to help blend the old pieces with the new ones. So she swapped the old beige-framed mirror from a simple one from IKEA, and spray painted the existing sconces black before swapping out the fluted shades for clear modern ones.
The whole serene redo came in at under $200 and took only a week of work.
“We wanted to give our bathroom a bold personality and make it somewhere we enjoyed being, either to relax and take a bath or just start our day,” Caroline says. “I’m glad we did our mini-renovation first before jumping into a big project that would need us to move fixtures, plumbing, or walls. This was a great compromise between changing the bathroom and keeping the framework the same.”
The results are pretty impressive for the price tag, too: “We were able to make it feel like a greenhouse spa! Now I enjoy it every time I walk in,” Caroline says.
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